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Bhartiya writes: For ages I have been convincing people to switch from close source to open source, from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. I have been telling people to ditch the controversial docx format and adopt .odt only to find myself in an embarrassing situation, thanks to Google.

The European Parliament is on the verge of adopting a directive reforming standards, reform which would introduce FRAND patent licensing terms, an undefined term which has been seen as a direct attack on the fundamental principles of Free and Open Source software. The Business Software Alliance has been very active trying to get FRAND terms into the directive.

The council of the Italian region of Puglia is about to approve the law proposed last December that will make the use of open source and open standards mandatory for the region's public administrations, according to news reports.

The Khronos Group today released the final WebGL 1.0 specification to enable hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in HTML5 Web browsers without the need for plug-ins. WebGL defines a JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES 2.0 to allow rich 3D graphics within a browser on any platform supporting the industry-standard OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics APIs.

We need to build communities and software around open protocols. We need to make it so that social networking is a protocol, much like e-mail is a protocol. [...] We need to create critical mass around open standards and protocols.

This edition covers the current developments in Open Standards policy, some basic information about software patents, an update from FSCONS about distributed computing, and how you can support us in the end of the year.

Windows Phone 7 is a threat to the world wide web and web apps. It plans to help the developers and users by going one up on fragmentation of Android but in the process will fragment the web app world itself. This is because the browser in WP7 is based on Internet Explorer 7.

When we get to explain our views in the plenary, we are after all speaking to 200-300 diplomats and specialist policy makers from around the world. You don’t get many opportunities to explain to such a crowd why software patents are a bad idea, or why patents in software standards must be licensed royalty-free and without restrictions on their use.

The European Interoperability Framework is just one battle among many. Besides the topic of interoperability in the public sector, there’s the task of reforming standardisation systems so that they produce Open Standards, and educating policy makers about the importance of the issue.

FSFE has obtained a copy of a letter sent to the Commission by the BSA last week. In the following paragraphs they analyse the BSA's arguments and explain why their claims are false, and why Open Standards are key to interoperability and competition in the European software market.

Software standards must be implementable in any software or business model, including those based on Free Software. When patents are included in software standards, they need to be licensed in a manner that doesn’t restrict their implementation in any way. Besides the absence of any other restriction, that means royalty-free licensing to any party implementing the standard.

First some definitions. In this post let’s define an “open standard” as one that is: 1) freely available, 2) developed in an open process and 3) freely implementable, e.g., is royalty free. I freely acknowledge that there are interests out there that attempt to soften these criteria, but that only demonstrates the competitive power presented by truly open standards.